Tag: Life

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Prayer of a weary soul

prayer

[I] hand over my really tired, weak, and weary desireless exhausted [self] over to thee
There [is] an incredible amount of emptiness in [me]
[I’m] barely conscious
Like [I] have been fully knocked out
There [is] not much left in [me] to put up a fight or resist.
[I] can barely stand on my own feet, let alone walk
What [is] this deathly condition?
[I] feel heavy, encumbered, overwhelmed, paralyzed, burdened, weary and can barely keep my head up
[A] severe deficiency of will power/desire/energy
The viruses or entropic agents within are getting the better of me, and [I] have exhausted [my] fight now
[I] can no longer ward off this inevitable destruction
So [I] stop resisting and surrender to death or total transformation
Which [is] what [I] avoided, most of [my] life
Why resist [the] inevitable? This has always been waiting for me anyway
So [I] give myself fully into [the] fire and chaos of transformation
[I] am actually dying into [the] fire of life
[My] avoidance of death [is] the avoidance of life
Because to give [oneself] into the fire, is to give in to 100% change or the ‘life process’ itself
[I] am fulfilling “Thy shall be done”
[I] have no belief anymore regarding what is on the other side
Because to have belief [is] to not give in sincerely
[I] am willingly entering the chaos of profound unknowing
Paradoxically entering this space [is] giving me profound knowings
How can [this] ever make logical sense?
How can [the] substrate underneath every possible contradiction make sense?
[I] previously lived in the digital world whereas now [I] am collapsing into the analog world
[The] analog world of the felt presence of direct indescribable experience
[I] know not where [I] am going, [I] have no map
[I] realize true life is the full entry into mystery and this is also a full entry into dying each moment
Each time [I] fully refresh and re-cognize, [I] create vacuum for the unimaginable to enter
This pulse of life [I] feel [is] similar to the pulse of breath [1/0]
[I] take a breath in fully leaving no gaps -> [I] Experience/Feel it fully -> [I] release it fully leaving a total vacuum
The more [I] give in to the fire, [I] see [I] am none of what I believed [I] was
[I] am a witness of this flow and all is changing
[I] drop into the [Abyss] and lose my [self]
[I] see nothing of true value is ever lost
The [self] BEHOLDS everything, but holds nothing
Like a mirror, Like water and its reflections
Every loss [is] gain
A trading of [the] finite for the infinite
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True persona vs. False persona

true-false

There are various equivalent spectrums:
High spirit power —————– Low spirit power
God attuned Ego/Self ———– Distant tuned Ego/Self
Vitality —————————— Depression
Coherence/Effortless harmony ———– Chaotic/Efforted harmony
Seratonin, Dopamine abundance ———- Seratonin Dopamine scarcity
Sun ———————— Moon
Truth ———————- Falsity
Giver ———————- Taker
Source ——————– Parasite
Home ——————— Exile
Abundance ————– Scarcity

The false persona needs borrowed energy to live OR it must live super frugally.
The god attuned persona on the other hand does not need energy from anybody else or anything, it has an infinite source of power within itself.
The false persona suffers when the true persona has not been cut off.
The constant conflict between the false person and the true persona manifests as disharmony and suffering.
Like 2 radio frequencies interfering with each other creating a lot of noise (which is suffering in this context).
When the false persona entirely cuts off the true persona, it lives without suffering and in full disconnection from abundance.
So such a persona lives purely opportunistically.
Since all connection is derived from connection to the true self, so a total severing of that connection is also a total severing of love.
So then the false persona works as an independent agent solely caring about its advantage and using the world as much as it can for its benefit.
Whereas the person who still has connection to his true self experiences a divide between:
Abundance/True self ———————————- Scarcity/False self
Service to other —————————————- Service to self
There are various degrees of polarization along this line.
People may fluctuate and move along this line experiencing suffering THROUGHOUT from the conflicting values of the 2 sides.
After all, Conflict = Suffering.
No Conflict = No suffering.
If you polarize to any one end, you would not suffer.
However when you are in the middle, there is a choice.
What will you choose?
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The game of life is rigged

chess

The game of life is rigged.
It is impossible to win.
As Alan Watts would say, “White will never really win over Black”.
Pleasure will never win over pain.
The opposites go together and it is impossible to have 1 and not the other.
One cannot take respite and consolation in hell, because heaven exists.
One cannot take respite and consolation in heaven, because hell exists.
No matter how much you walk to the East, the West still exists behind you.
No matter how much you walk to the North, the South still exists behind you.
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Transformation and Healing are simultaneous

change

Old structure —-<—{Transformation}—- Chaos —{Healing}–>– New structure

Life is an endless movement from the old to the new.
—->— old ————>———– new —->—
When in-between the passage, if you look at your old structure you see transformation.
On the other hand, if you look at the prospective new structure from this mid point, you see healing/becoming (heading towards the new state of coherence).
So they both are simultaneous, the view just changes between transformation and healing depending on whether you look backwards or forwards.

This is similar to how creation and destruction are simultaneous in the movement of life. Again depends on which direction you look.
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e-motion = energy in motion.

rainbowhearts

Emotion is what makes us move.
The mind/intellect is the map.
The emotion is the motor.
If you have no emotion, then the map only shows you infinitely possibilities.
In fact if you have only the mind, it will simply show you the pros and cons with every investment.
It will paralyze you with indecision by showing you infinite EQUIVALENT possibilities.
It is love that moves everything.
All “will” is from emotion, from the heart.
The seat of vitality is in the heart.
All instruments serve the divine heart.
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The whole moves the whole

Peintures

The whole moves the whole (truth)
No part moves the whole (illusion of agency)
No part moves another part (illusion of causation)
The whole has no history (story/narrative illusion)
It is ever refreshing, ever renewing (dance of the ONE)
The whole is alive (I am aliveness)
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Hate crimes are the tip of the iceberg

iceberg

We all have our unique points of view (from long causal chains) and it may happen that the system around you (which has its own causal chain) might get seriously hostile to you (it’s relative, like an unfolding drama).
The hostility may be a direct abuse or even through utter neglect of you or whatever you are offering.

THERE ARE 2 BROAD BRANCHES:
Blaming of self/self is responsible —————- Blaming of other/other is responsible
The 2 are not water tight compartments though, they are oscillate.
Also at a broader level the basic emotion is the same, but the center of gravity of the individual may differ widely based on the conditioning he/she received. The arrow of it points to the self or the other and accordingly has consequences.
We usually do not look into self-destructive types much and usually a lot of them stay totally invisible, however the other-destructive types usually hit the limelight.
So the phenomenon itself is much broader, we only see the tip of the iceberg which is the people who commit really prominent hate crimes against others.

INNER FEELINGS:

* So the first feelings to arise are: SADNESS/HURT which comes from THWARTED DESIRE or FAILURE.
* You then re-examine, re-evaluate, try again with a new strategy and if you either fail to break through or you realize the situation is quite hopeless from your analysis you fall into GRIEF/DEPRESSION.

So depression is the lower part of the iceberg while hurt is the tiny upper part.
Similarly grief is the lower part of the iceberg while sadness is the tiny upper part.
Sadness is the ‘pain of loss’ or ‘failure’ or ‘realization of the impossibility of achievement’ of a quick immediate goal.
Grief is the failure/loss/’impossibility…’ of the entire context/ground on which you are standing.
“FUTILITY” then arises, which is when you cannot conceive of a way out no matter how hard you try.

FEELINGS TOWARDS THE OUTER: “Which mirror the inner states in an attempt to amend”

* In the first encounter with ‘hurt/sadness’, the outer feelings could be:
– ‘ANGER'(if you think the other was unfair or you were unfair, which implies you have a firm fairness structure in you) = translates into you projecting the anger into suppressing yourself or suppressing the other – violence to self or violence to the other.
– ‘CONFUSION’ (if you cannot figure out what happened/no structure in which to understand) = Here you invest all your energy in a hyper-vigilant state of other-awareness and most of the time, you behave like a zombie when in this confusion.

* Then secondary outward feelings develop on repeated failures and pain:
– Anger turns into HOSTILITY/HATE/CONTEMPT = directed to the self or the other.
– Confusion turns into RESENTMENT/FRUSTRATION/RUMINATION = directed to the self or the other.

* Then tertiary feelings happen when the previous step once again fails with intensification of pain:
– The hostility turns into BLIND RAGE/AGGRESSION/MURDER – towards self (self mutilation, suicide) or the other (hate crimes, murder, mass killing)
– The endless frustration turns into TOTAL NIHILISM/PSYCHOSIS – here it is only to self because he/she barely has the strength and structure to affect others who may just desert him/her.

So to sum it up, I have laid out a model here. It isn’t complete but I wanted to demonstrate the complexity of these phenomena. What we call serial killings etc. are the tip of the tip of the iceberg of some of the dynamics and mechanics I have described here.
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The self is endless morphing

I read this great analogy in one of the essays from Nagarjuna:

shipathorizon

“When you go to the shore and look out, you see the edge of the world, six miles out. You see a ship get too close to the edge of the world; it falls off. That’s terrible; all those people die. It happens far too often. If you go to the beach, you’ve probably seen it once or twice. You are trapped in an illusion!

So let’s say someone sticks you in the space shuttle, blasts you into orbit. You look down, you see it’s a sphere. They explain gravity. You go back to the beach. It looks just like it did before, but you no longer can see to the edge of the world. You no longer get engaged in discussions about “when you fall off the edge of the world, does it hurt immediately, or does it hurt only when you hit the bottom?” That doesn’t make any sense; you understand the illusion.

This is what the Buddha’s saying about the self. Don’t get caught in discussions about the self–does the self exist, does the self not exist. That’s like trying to decide if it hurts when you fall off the edge of the world or not. Look at the world in terms of dependently originated phenomena. That’s all that’s happening.”

This analogy was so deep, it got me thinking.
I started to see other related metaphors that demonstrate a similar point.
I’ll cover two of them below.

Mountain climbing analogy:

conquer-mountain-winter-climbing-aolne-hd-wallpaper

Suppose you decide to climb a mountain.
As you gaze at it from a distance, it stands like a large mysterious awe inspiring object in front of you.
It beckons you to explore, tread and conquer it by reaching its peak.
The peak is usually covered in snow with a foggy haze around it, which stimulates the feeling of mystery and attainment even more.
From this point of view, you resolve to reach the peak and keep walking.
Now as you walk through all the various camps, at each place you see different worlds.
Initially, there is the forest portion, then there are the grasslands, then there is the harsh hostile terrain, and then finally you hit the tall patch of snow as you race to the top.
Various realms/worlds/points of view are traversed as you move along.
Finally when you do reach the peak, doesn’t it look quite different from your conception of it which you had when you were far off on the ground?
You are seeing from a brand new point of view, but at the same time, you are still there, and this feeling of you was not different when you were on the ground, nor was it different as you passed through all the intermediate terrain.
My experience of life has been that way since my earliest memory.
At one level I am moving through stages, goals, progressing, but at another level I am still the same innocence moving from place and place.
The innocence stays untouched, but the scenery keeps morphing.

Staring at a fractal:

Mandel_zoom_08_satellite_antenna

Have you ever played a video of a fractal zoom on YouTube and just stared at it for a while?
Notice how you see a destination, and you see the fractal moving towards it, but at the same time, as the destination becomes larger and clearer, your whole view is replaced by that, and the earlier view fades.
And in this way, there is a kind of endless renewal and an endless movement at the same time.
I think this clearly illustrates the symbol ‘Ouroboros’.
It also reveals the paradox of there being ‘change’ and yet ‘no change’ at the same time.
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Hierarchy of nested contexts

many-worlds

There is no ONE physical world in our experiential reality.
This is more of an abstract idea or concept we sometimes hold in our minds.
In experiential reality however, there is no such ONE world.
Rather there are many many worlds appearing as a nested context hierarchy.
A common context is the commonality.
It conveys “We both are seeing and inhabiting the same world”.

Transcendence is to move from your current context to a higher context.
So there is infinite transcendence(s) as there are infinite nested context hierarchies.
For example: From a geographical point of view, here is a nested context hierarchy:
…Multiverse -> Visible Universe -> Super Galaxy Cluster -> Galaxy Cluster -> Milky Way Galaxy -> Solar System -> Earth -> Continent -> Country -> State -> City -> Area -> Locality -> Building -> Floor number -> Apartment number -> Your room…
The 3 dots on either end is to show that it goes on indefinitely in both directions.
Have you seen the videos on YouTube where they would start from all the way out of the universe and zoom you all the way in until you reach quarks?

Coming to the social sphere, tuning into each context creates a different world inhabited by different people.
What we call ‘our world’ is the context we inhabit.
The status game in society:
People value/e-valu-ate themselves, and then sell themselves to others at a cost.
The whole status game is that: e-valu-ation.
The 2 parties evaluate each other on looks, talents, popularity, status, attractiveness, opportunities, commonality, happiness and so on.
People link up with each other in groups of equivalent status, which forms the common context.

Each context is a world, and you instantly access the common field of information that all the other inhabitants there are holding too.
In a sense that is what unites all of you, it is the context, or the common world.
I can speak about my experience:
– When I was in school (in India), the context was the same for all students in the state known as “state board”. So everyone had the same syllabus and more or less the same school system too. So that was the common context/common world. I was in the same world as most other students in the entire state and to a large extent the entire country.
– When I joined an Engineering college, that put me in that context world and gave me access to all other engineers in the country along with the status hierarchy inside that. There were some colleges which were graded at the same level as mine, and there were some other colleges that were of graded lower, and so on.
– Later, when working in an Indian IT company, I had access to all other friends fresh out of college working in the IT industry and many of my friends were working in similar IT firms as me.
– Then when doing my Masters in US, the university was the common context and that was the new world I found myself in. I could relate up, horizontally, and down the education ladder i.e. with PhD students, other masters students, undergrads and so on. I could share context with other friends doing Masters in other universities too, and so on.
– I then took up a job at a product development company in US, and I was in the world of post-grad professionals working for US IT companies.
So to summarize, I moved through 5 worlds:
– The world of school
– The world of undergrad college
– The world of post-undergrad work
– The world of masters program at a large university
– The world of post-grad work

Now I am in a different world and I do not know what mystical new world/context awaits me.
So these contexts are OUR REAL WORLDS.
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Conflict of values

conflict-of-values

This is a very vast and deep topic.
David Hawkins had a very interesting abstract picture regarding how values emerge: Context -> Meaning -> Value -> Goals.
So context creates meaning, meaning creates values, and values create goals.
I am going to narrow my analysis here, but the same could be applied to any set of conflicting values.

A conflict which I often face is between orienting myself towards “likeability” or “truth”.
When I agree with everything someone says, usually, I am not “liked” per say by that person, but I get a background of ‘acceptability’ in their life.
It is primarily a strategy to avoid conflict and rejection.
So “Conflict avoidance” and “Rejection avoidance” are some of my values.
Now, if I go out of my way to please a person by showering them with compliments, astute positive observations in a sophisticated subtle way (if you are too overt about it, it will backfire, make you look desperate and they will avoid you) or buy them gifts and basically give them a lot of loving attention, then I enter the “Likeability” territory.
So that is another value I have: “Secure Likeability points”

On the other side of the spectrum, I want to speak the truth to people and not filter anything out, whatever it may be.
It may be a combination of things I like and do not like.
OR I may want to ask for something I need from them.
This is my value of: “Truth”
Now, this is a dangerous territory.
Because, things are not equally weighed.
You may give 10 compliments and get +10 points, but if you are critical of something they are sensitive about, it may shut down the whole conversation and result in instant rejection or may greatly reduce all the goodwill accumulated.
And once they get defensive, now if you persist in what you said, the inclusion will be lost and it will become a war.
And this would go against my value of: “Inclusion”

Also, once I trigger something in the other turning them into ‘defense’/’attack’ against me, I have lost the inclusion and lost the trust in that moment.
This makes me fearful and makes me defensive too, in both cases, esp. in the attack case.
This goes against my value of: “Safety”

Always agreeing to everything the other says, is not “interesting” and neither is it “genuine”, and it also lowers the value of my agreement because I give it out to everything the other says. Also I may never express my own opinion about the issue.
So me doing that violates 4 values of: “Being interesting”, “Being genuine”, “Being valued”, “Being heard”

But I also value “Listening”, so I may not interrupt the other when they speak.
There are also some other values like: “Fair Participation”, “Fair involvement” & “Respect, i.e. both the people in conversation get to express all that they had in mind, both were equally involved in each other, both were equally heard, and both contexts were embraced.

My social life and interacting with others tends to invoke this chaotic soup of values in me which then drive my actions.
I am looking for a way to resolve this chaos.
There are 2 ways of resolving this in my understanding:
1 – Commit to certain values, polarize, and discard the rest
2 – Shift the center of gravity to a higher value structure that includes and transcends all these values.